Case Study: CDIA

Building Meaningful Relationships

We built a website for a large ecosystem of multi-cultural actors
as a jump-off point for investments in Asia’s urban futures.

Before the Jump

The Cities Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA) had a messaging challenge. For one, admittedly, it’s hard to immediately understand what they do. Second, while their branding was relevant (and delightful!), their current website did not make the most of either branding nor communicating CDIA’s key points to their visitors, of which there are many. Catering to a diverse ecosystem of consultants, national and local government officials, partners, trainers, and funding members, it was important that the website hurdle its messaging and design shortfalls.

CDIA had some beautiful illustrations as part of their branding.

The Big Leap

There was a considerable amount of content that needed to be designed. How will we make navigating through this content easier for the user? For a user on a tablet? For a user on a smartphone? One of the biggest challenges was understanding how users experience the Projects section, of which there are many records. The previous design used a geographic map, which, while novel in some respects, offered only a single point of entry to the content (geographic location). Users will be more interested in aspects like project size, status and even title. The new design went back to basics by presenting the Projects in a low-bandwidth, sortable paginated data grid — something many users are familiar with — that allowed for many points of entry.

How We Landed

Stakeholders in the organization started getting excited about using their website. More content is available on their site than ever before. Users now have mobile and tablet access and content managers can now easily update the site. Any future rethinking of the site can be easily accommodated by the best-practice use of WordPress, where content types were granulated to make editing as quick and confident as possible.